Out With the Knit, in With the Wine

Josh Haner/The New York Times
Akron/Family, surrounded by guests, performed on New Year's Eve at the
Knitting Factory, which is leaving Manhattan for Brooklyn. More Photos >

By BEN SISARIO
Published: January 1, 2009
IT was an especially cacophonous "Auld Lang Syne." But for the Knitting
Factory's last night in Manhattan, it was appropriate, as the shaggy
avant-folk group Akron/Family led a version of that Scottish New Year's hymn
on Wednesday night that mutated from a simple singalong to screeching
feedback to a meditative one-note drone.

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Michael Falco for The New York Times
The Knitting Factory has been celebrating noise and eclecticism ever since
it opened on East Houston Street in 1987, and in its earlier days the club
gained renown as a defining stage for downtown music, that clamorous and
unclassifiable New York amalgam of jazz, punk, art-rock and every kind of
experimentation.

But once again an arty Manhattan outpost has become a victim of the
neighborhood renewal it helped to foster. The Knitting Factory, which moved
to Leonard Street in TriBeCa in 1994, can no longer afford the area's rising
rents and will reopen in May in a considerably smaller and less expensive
space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

This real-estate drama, however, has a twist: one of the area's gentrifiers
is a stylish new restaurant and performance space opened by Michael Dorf,
the founder of the Knitting Factory. New Year's Eve also served as the debut
of City Winery, on Varick Street in the South Village nearby, with a
performance by Joan Osborne, and the two concerts could hardly have been
more different.

At the Knitting Factory, where the dominant color was, as it has always
been, black, a bohemian young audience sweated out the night in sardine
closeness, with about a dozen acts performing on three floors. A note
slapped above the second-floor bar read simply "PBR can $3." At the
spacious, golden-hued City Winery, Ms. Osborne sang bluesy soft rock in a
crimson gown, and the sold-out crowd - many of whom looked as though they
could well have been the parents of the Knitting Factory clientele - sat
comfortably at tables and ordered from a list of 500 wines.

Mr. Dorf, who ran the Knitting Factory from its opening until he left the
company in 2003, has said City Winery is intended for music fans who have
outgrown their dive-bar phase and prefer a more elegant night out. There is
warm lighting and table seating for 350. Mr. Dorf's $5 million establishment
allows for every step of the winemaking process to occur on the premises, he
said, from the crushing of the grapes to fermentation and aging. A
membership program gives customers their own barrel in the basement; clients
include Lou Reed, a longtime friend to the Knitting Factory.

Kerianne Flynn, 41, who lives nearby in TriBeCa, said she signed up her
husband, James, for a barrel for his birthday.

"There's really nothing this sophisticated in the city," Ms. Flynn said,
"where you can see live music and have great wine, great food, and be with
grown-ups."

At the Knitting Factory, revelers seemed perfectly happy to be not so grown
up, as fan after fan climbed onstage during Akron/Family's set to get in one
last stage dive.

In recent years some critics have complained that the Knitting Factory's
programming has suffered as it moved further from its experimental origins.
But Wednesday's show was a classic example of the club's wide-ranging and
progressive taste.

Akron/Family, which made its reputation in Brooklyn and whose members are
now split between New York and Pennsylvania, headlined an evening with
Deerhoof, a sprightly and unpredictable art-pop band from San Francisco;
Dirty Projectors, one of the leaders of a renaissance of experimental rock
in Brooklyn; and Deer Tick, the nom de plume of the alt-country songwriter
John McCauley.

"It's very much a storied place," Courtney Harkins, 19, said. "I wanted to
see it before it goes away," she added, pulling a flier from the wall as the
club was closing just before 2 a.m., its floor a mush of spilled beer and
fallen confetti.

When the Knitting Factory opened in TriBeCa, the area still had remnants of
its past as an artist-colonized wasteland. But in recent years the club has
sometimes clashed with the upscale new residents and businesses.

"People think they want music and arts and entertainment," said Morgan
Margolis, a longtime employee who was recently named president of the parent
company, Knitting Factory Entertainment. "They think that until they buy a
$3 million loft and there's a line of 400 kids outside a rock club
downstairs."

Mr. Margolis, whose father is the actor Mark Margolis ("Requiem for a
Dream"), grew up in TriBeCa, and the scene he describes of his childhood
home is almost unrecognizable today. "It was empty," he said. "You could
play ball in the streets. It was a great place to grow up."

Today, of course, Manhattan rents have forced most of the rock 'n' roll
crowd to Brooklyn, where new clubs sprout up regularly; one, the Bell House,
opened in Gowanus in September.

The Knitting Factory itself has also expanded far beyond TriBeCa. In 2000 it
opened a sister club in Los Angeles, and two years ago it took over large
clubs in Boise, Idaho, and Spokane, Wash., which have lately been providing
the company with a large portion of its revenue. Mr. Margolis will be based
in Los Angeles; the main business offices of Knitting Factory Entertainment
are in Boise.

In Brooklyn, the Knitting Factory is taking over the former Luna Lounge, on
Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg. The club will have a capacity of around
200, which should remove it from the fierce competition among midsize spaces
(the main room in TriBeCa held 400 people), but also move it farther from
the spotlight.

Patrons on New Year's Eve bemoaned the loss of the TriBeCa club but were
hardly surprised by its need to move out of Manhattan. Some were already
predicting the next relocation.

"The gentrification in Lower Manhattan is happening in Brooklyn now, too,"
said Tim Hiles, 31, who came down from Providence, R.I., for the show. "Even
though they're moving to Brooklyn, 10 years later they'll probably have to
move somewhere else."